Why Sweden Clears Snow-Covered Walkways Before Roads | Hacker News Reader

Why Sweden Clears Snow-Covered Walkways Before Roads

usa.streetsblog.org

18 pointsthecortado4 comments

Coupling sexism to snow clearing order. I have now seen it all. This is getting to be quite the stretch. The correlation is tenious at best from the data they presented.

Don't see that. This seems pretty clear, and (as usual for Scandanavia, unlike almost everywhere else) rational:

"Three times as many people are injured while walking in icy conditions in Sweden than while driving. And the cost of those injuries far exceeds the cost of snow clearance."

Everyone knows that this is the next level of crazy. In the winter, people don’t walk their kids long distances to kindergarden - they drive. And the unlucky souls who walk, it never was a problem because it’s easier to put on a better pair of shoes than to replace your car with a snowmobile.

Since this began there has been absolute chaos in society, last year people was abandoning their cars on the biggest road in Sweden(E4) and walked home - because the roads weren’t plowed.

More side effects of this was that all shipments were delayed which caused billions in financial loss for the society, emergency personell was unable to get around and people died, all buses and trains were cancelled.

What would a change in the prioritization of how roads, bike paths, and sidewalks are cleared cause all the trains to be cancelled? I thought the trains had their own routes and own clearing equipment?

I tried researching this but nearly all the news in English is from the pro-Trump/right-wing press using this to ridicule feminism. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gender-equal-snow-removal-... said the trains were running at half-speed, which make me think that the feminist-based snow clearing policy wasn't the main problem.

I did read that it was the biggest snowfall in 111 years - surely that played a role as well, yes?

Almost all of the articles I found were published within a couple of days of the event, and all referencing the same Swedish news sources. I didn't find anything which described how many of the chaos was due to the different snow cleaning prioritization and how much was due to the amount of snow. I imagine other factors might also be important, like the amount of lead time in knowing there would be that much snow, or if (since it was an early season snow) people hadn't expected such a storm, and perhaps not yet switched to winter tires.

No doubt the Swedish news all covered these details, but that doesn't help me much.

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